Ghost in the Shellcode

2012 Final Round

Thanks so much to everyone for playing in the final round. While we certainly wish we could have run a perfect game, there were--as there often is--definitely some problems, and for that, we appologize. While many of those problems were ours and there are no excuses (such as not double-checking key contents, or directory permissions -- silly mistakes we all know to avoid!), we did want to make mention that nearly all of the problems with the scoreboard were due to the load-balancer. Apparently the AWS load balancer we were behind was experiencing some global stability issues that even other users were reporting. In hindsight, we should have fallen back to something simpler like a DNS round-robin approach to the multiple web-frontends.

While most of you probably don't care, we figured we'd update those that do in the interests of transparency. Lessons learned for next year. This was our first year running our infrastructure on Amazon's hardware, and while we're generally very pleased with the results, there were definitely some lessons learned as well. But on to the results!

Results

First, congratulations to PPP for once again topping the charts at Ghost in the Shellcode. While last year Awesie was able to do it by himself, this year it looked to be a complete team effort as they were able to make a valiant effort to hold off the persistant Eindbazen.

In fact, thanks to Eindbazen for the great score graph, letting us be lazy and not have to do it ourselves. ;-)